Diary of a Mad Scientist

The Saturday and Sunday after the SF class, though, I had an information-packed encounter with something completely new- sailing school. Oh, My! it was two days of 8-4, incredibly fun, low student-teacher ratio, lots of practical hands-on training, we were on the water almost the entire time. SOOOO fun. I’d always felt like an idiot for moving here to the Bay and not doing anything with all the water around me.

I can’t say enough good things about Olympic Circle Sailing Club (the school). I was of course watching the teaching styles for tips on my own teaching, and they obviously had a really developed ’style’ that all the teachers followed. I found out later that the school spends 2 months training their new teachers in the school’s teaching style, and it’s really effective.

I also had a great time exercising my brain for the first time in a while. Partly because of biodiesel, and partly because of being sick, I’d become so focused the last couple of years on my biodiesel pursuit to the exclusion of social life, reading, or just about anything else. To some extent I’d become “illiterate” outside of biodiesel. I watched it happen and kind of let it happen, figuring I didnt have the energy for a full life anyway, and that it’d be an interesting experiment when I finally decided to learn new things again. I figured at least I’d become really good at understanding biodiesel.

So, sailing- it was great to pick up something new from outside the world of biodiesel. It reminded me of learning a musical instrument- similar coordination/hand-eye-brain coordination. Similar level of theory as what I’d experienced when I played music (I’m actually an ear learner rather than a music theory person though) Looking forward to doing more learning, sailing or otherwise.

I left the foothills this weekend for another bout with Mad Rush Disease- there’s an epidemic of Mad Rush in the Bay Area and I’m no exception.

Friday I co-taught a class at SF’s community college, with SaraHope Smith of Biofuel Oasis. We did a morning of Powerpoint, trying to cover all the bases, and did an afternoon of 1-liter batches and ‘mad science lab’ with the students who wanted to homebrew.

It’s a great facility- the automotive department of the community college, one of the best-equipped and biggest auto schools I’ve ever seen. They have a motorcycle department, and regularly do alternative fuel seminars (CNG, and have something on hybrids coming up), and are helping other community colleges in the area do some of the same seminars. Two of the instructors built a scratchbuilt electric vehicle 15 years ago and have put 50,000 miles on it since then, which is quite a feat considering the small daily range of such EV’s.

Last time when we taught this class, there was an A/V guy helping set up the projector. He had long hair, looked like a hardcore Burning Man person, dressed in a black Utility Kilt and those socks kilt-wearers wear, and I assumed that he was some freaky computer geek volunteer. Turns out the ‘guy in a skirt’ (OK, the Scots will get upset that I just called a kilt a skirt) was the automotive department’s department head. I love SF.

Speaking of SF, I absolutely never go there. I moved out here from NYC and I was really ‘over’ big cities. Berkeley/Oakland certainly is a big huge city but the size of the house lots in Berkeley at least, still makes me feel like it’s a bit smaller or at least a little more green and livable. SF reminds me of all the land issues I hate about NYC, with the stressed-out people associated with high rents and all, people crammed into tiny apartments, with the rent instability associated with it.

After the class, Hope and I climbed to the park at Bernal Heights- a huge hill with a 300 degree panoramic view of the city and the East Bay. Wow. I’d never gone there before. New York City really needs something like that- a park on top of a Midtown skyscraper or something, something to give us ants on the ground, a sense of perspective. For a while when I was a bike messenger in NY years ago, I was keeping a list in NYC of skyscrapers you could walk in off the street and get into without dealing with a security desk, where you could sneak a view out of a hallway window. Today in the anti-terrorism climate, such list-making probably a federal offense.

It was a glorious clear day, no fog, and you can see for miles, and the big ugly city turns really picturesque and harmless from up here. Hope and I were chitchatting mindlessly. I’d really gotten out of doing nice social things like that. I was starting to feel like perhaps I actually have the potential to ‘get a life’ when of course Hope asks the dreaded question I hate so much:

’so what is your motivation in all this biodiesel stuff?’.

ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!! I hate the motivation question. I dont’ care. I dont
know what my motivation is. I don’t expect other people who are JUST as embroiled in biodiesel to ask, either. She doesn’t have a life because of biodiesel, either. The whole thing is a stupid question. Why’d she have to ask that?